Vice President of Product Sho Kuwamoto and Product Designer Nikolas Klein walk us through the journey of multi-edit. Love this observation: ​“When you look at Figma, almost every feature that helps you structure your file has a free-spirited cousin feature for the times when you want to keep things loose. You can use styles and tokens to change your colors quickly, but if you want to leave things unstructured, you can use the selection colors feature to make mass edits. You can use auto layout to group things into stacks and move them quickly, but if you want to leave things unstructured, you can use the smart selection feature to reorder things quickly. When it came to editing, you could use components to edit multiple copies of an object quickly, but if you wanted to leave things unstructured, we just didn’t have a great alternative!”

Sho Kuwamoto on variables and simplicity: ​“The obvious way to make things simpler is to remove things. Or maybe hide things. But one of the surprising aspects of simplicity is that sometimes, in order to make things feel more simple, you have to add more stuff.”

Vice President of Product, Sho Kuwamoto, explains why quality-of-life improvements are at the core of Figma: ​“I don’t want to be at a company that only invests in things that will make headlines. I want to make a product that I feel proud of. The truth is, people do resonate with little changes, and we know that because we pay attention to our users’ individual stories. Plus, when you celebrate the small things and give each one their moment, it gives people a chance to recognize how important each one is.”

A guest post in Lenny Rachitsky’s newsletter by Figma VP of Product Sho Kuwamoto on the importance of feel, service, and staying close to customers. ​“Fast-forward to 2023, and Figma has grown beyond what I could have imagined. It’s gotten to the point where people often ask me for advice on how to prioritize features or how to run a product process. These questions are hard for me to answer, because I don’t think we do anything special. Our process is messy and we make mistakes. We create designs and then throw them away. We miscommunicate all the time and forget to write things down.”

Fascinating comments from Sho Kuwamoto, Figma’s VP of Product, on how plugins are implemented. Each plugin runs in a security sandbox — ​“We actually took a JavaScript VM, compiled it down to WebAssembly, and then we run that VM inside of the browser. So it’s a completely separate engine than the native JS engine. For security reasons, we don’t want two scripts running inside that VM, because then the two scripts could potentially have access to each other. And we don’t want to run two instances of this VM, for memory reasons.” 🤯

At the recent All-Hands call Sho Kuwamoto confirmed that Figma is working on design tokens. Schema Conference seems to be a perfect moment to announce them, so fingers crossed!

Sho Kuwamoto describes how the editor team works. Building the process around ​“What do our users want us to make better?” instead of self-centered questions is probably what makes Figma so magical.

Sho Kuwamoto, Director of Product at Figma, on new features and applying the concept of ​“composition” from engineering to design systems.

Sho Kuwamoto, Director of Product at Figma, talks about user input.

Sho Kuwamoto on the role of widgets and how Figma and FigJam work together. See also his thoughts on why design tools exist.

Sho Kuwamoto on why it took so long to build and how other smaller features fit in a bigger vision.

Sho Kuwamoto, Director of Product at Figma. ​“Join Sho as he kicks off our inaugural Schema conference with opening remarks. Tune in for his reflections on how design systems have grown and changed and how us system designers can help shape a better, more inclusive future.”

Figma’s Director of Product Sho Kuwamoto shares some of the challenges of building branching.

Figma profile by Index Ventures, with insights from Sho Kuwamoto and Dylan Field.

Sho Kuwamoto provides some context for their decision.

Figma’s Director of Product Sho Kuwamoto joined All Turtles podcast to talk about building Figma, seamless collaboration, and life in general.

Thread by Director of Product at Figma on how their team operates.

Director of Product at Figma Sho Kuwamoto asks a fundamental question. There are dozens of responses from the community, but don’t miss Dylan Field’s thread.